'The Peddler's Grandson' coming to Davis May 21

Even if you aren't Jewish, even if you didn't grow up in the South, you will
enjoy reading Edward Cohen's memoir "The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up
Jewish in Mississippi" (University Press of Mississippi, 1999, $25).

Cohen will give a reading from his book at Border's in Davis on Sunday, May
21, at 2 p.m.

"The Protestant South I grew up in was more like a Bible Blanket than a
Bible Belt, not so much constricting as smothering everyone in commonality,"
he wrote. "Fitting in is the 1st Commandment of childhood, and for no one
does this seem more imperative than for a child who can't.

"Of the 100,000 people then living in my hometown of Jackson, perhaps 300
were Jews, and so, by faith and by numbers, I was defined as an outsider. My
life would have been far different had my immigrant grandparents stayed with
other Jews in the North instead of inexplicably extending their journey even
farther, to a land where Jews were as few as they were exotic," Cohen added.

His grandfather, Moise, left Romania and his family for a different world.
Peddling on foot from farm to farm, sleeping in haylofts, he was the first
Jew many in the deep Mississippi countryside had ever seen. Moise's brother,
Sam, joined him and they married sisters, raising their families under one
roof.

The two brothers opened a clothing store in Jackson and that's where Edward
Cohen's father spent his working career.

Cohen was born in Jackson's Baptist Hospital and grew up in Jackson, his
childhood spanning the 1950s and 1960s. The only child to miss school in
order to celebrate Jewish holidays, he knew he was different.

In third grade, he faced a crisis. While all the other kids planned to take
part in a Christmas pageant, what could Cohen do?

"My parents, who were Southern Jews and therefore schooled in compromise,
determined that I could either play an inanimate object, a rock or a tree,
or I could work backstage pulling the curtains." Cohen manned the curtains.

In sixth grade he read a book that seemed, unhappily, to sum up his whole
existence. It was "The Man Without a Country."

Later, the civil rights struggle rocked Jackson and the whole of the South.
"My own loyalties were impossibly mixed," he recalled.

"My father's clothing store, with its largely black clientele, was located
on Capitol Street, the geographical center of the civil rights struggle in
Jackson. Both of his employees were black, and to my knowledge he was the
only white merchant in the city who called blacks "Mr." and "Mrs." and had
an integrated restroom and water fountain," he recalled.

"Even so, his store was included when the NAACP mounted a boycott of
downtown merchants. As the outsider, as the Jew, my father tried to effect
some compromise between the segregationist merchants and the NAACP. But
neither side would yield."

Finally, Cohen left Mississippi when he was accepted at the University of
Miami. He pledged a Jewish fraternity.

"Finally I was with Jews, but they were a different tribe, one to which I
didn't belong. To them, the South was exotic, unthinkable, a bumpkin patch."

Cohen quit the fraternity, but smoothed out his accent and kept his
Mississippi origins murky. He told people he was from New Orleans, the most
cosmopolitan Southern city he could think of.

He could no more stop being a Southerner than he could stop being a Jew.
Today, Cohen and his wife, Kathy, live in Venice, Calif., where he is a
free-lance writer and filmmaker. Everyone fits in in Southern California. Or
maybe Cohen has learned to stop fighting his roots.

"I might not be comfortable on any one shore, but now I've learned the
difference between discovering who I am and inventing it," he wrote.
"Invention for me meant erasure, and whether it was my Southern or my Jewish
half that I hoped to lose, each time I tried, I got smaller.

"I may be a man without a country, but I carry two passports," he concluded.
Come meet Cohen at Borders in Davis a week from today.

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